Monday, September 20, 2004

The New York Times > Technology > Sun Looks to Wall Street in a Comeback Bid

The New York Times > Technology > Sun Looks to Wall Street in a Comeback Bid "More than any other factor, though, it will be the success or failure of Solaris 10 - the new operating system being shown to Wall Street this week - that could determine whether Sun can return to anything resembling its former glory. Analysts and first customers of the new software say it represents a generational shift for Sun, offering a variety of technology features not available under Linux or Windows.
Key functions include a performance monitoring system called D-Trace that makes it easy to see how programs are functioning during normal business operations, and to identify any bottlenecks and work around them to make the programs run faster. Another new feature, Containers, is meant to let corporate users crowd programs more efficiently onto a single computer.
A file storage system called ZFS organizes information in a modular fashion that removes many of the data limits of a file-based system and is designed to offer better data protection. ZFS is particularly impressive, analysts note, because a similar feature has proved a thorny technical challenge for Microsoft and is one of the reasons it has delayed introduction of its Longhorn version of Windows."